More on giving up books
Okay, I have to admit, I was intrigued enough by the reviews on GoodReads to skim a little more into A Reliable Wife. The bad reviews, specifically. They're usually the ones that give you more insight into the story anyway.
Oh my GOD it only gets worse. The writing gets hollower and the sex gets unsexier and more disturbing. And I say this as someone who owns and enjoys the first two Kushiel novels!
First, let's look at the hollow writing. I present some sentences copied straight from the book:
"She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she walked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and listless people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her. Okay, this is a bit ornate, but there's promise. Let's see what the next paragraph brings.
They owned plates. They all had socks. The world is filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily few she had known, really known, in her life."
Wait, what? Did that really say? No way. No freakin' way.
*rereads*
"They owned plates. They all had socks."
This is no-shit honest-to-God ripped right from the pages of this book. Page 69 of the Algonquin Paperbacks edition.
Here is an example of the unsexy sexy thoughts of one Mr. Ralph Truitt, sex maniac who constantly thinks about sex. (This is from page 94 of the same edition.)
"He wanted her teeth to bite him. To leave marks on his back, his legs. He wanted her hair to strangle him. He wanted her to tell him that his touch would not kill her.
He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body."
RUN, CATHERINE!
And then the rape scene at the end. I just...really? Really? This is the high dramatic moment you want to close out the conflict with? More excruciating detail from Plot Point Character Antonio's perspective full of sentences such as:
"He took his hand away from her mouth and kissed her, violated her mouth with his tongue and bit at her lips and still she didn't make a sound, still she stood twisting beneath his arms, but soundlessly, only the rustle of her skirt on the floor, only the sound of the flapping wings of birds and the rustling of the palm fronds where the birds alighted."
Two things about the above sentence: 1. This story takes place in Wisconsin, which apparently had palm trees in 1907. 2. My dad read a Rumpole of the Bailey book in which the first sentence took up a page and a half. Looks like Goolrick's giving old Rumpole a run for his money there.
Then there is this: "His hair was wild, it was slick with sweat from the exertion of doing this thing he didn't want to do, this thing he had to do to bring himself one step closer to his own death."
He had to do this thing he did not want to do but had to do this thing that was a bad thing to do. That's how I read that.
And then Catherine starts crying because apparently Goolrick heard that women cry when they're raped, so he had to put that in. You know, for realism.
And then Ralph Truitt walks in and finds Antonio raping his (Ralph's) wife. Antonio's response is "Yes! I raped her. I've been with her, inside her a thousand times. Do you know what she is? Do you know who she is?"
HIGH DRAMA! Or, as the Master Thespian put it, ACTING!
And we wrap up the scene by having Ralph and Antonio get out years of father/son rage (which is why I called him Plot Point Antonio earlier) by fighting and running out onto the thin ice where Antonio falls through and dies in the icy water which I'm sure is very tragic indeed.
This book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Just more proof that people will buy anything if you slap a pretty cover on it.
Oh my GOD it only gets worse. The writing gets hollower and the sex gets unsexier and more disturbing. And I say this as someone who owns and enjoys the first two Kushiel novels!
First, let's look at the hollow writing. I present some sentences copied straight from the book:
"She thought of the rooms she had left behind, the rooms in which she walked and breathed, the way they were furnished, the way voices carried in through the open windows, the way she walked and wept in them. She stared down at the stupid and listless people who had somehow managed to achieve in a flawlessly easy way those dear little things that eluded her. Okay, this is a bit ornate, but there's promise. Let's see what the next paragraph brings.
They owned plates. They all had socks. The world is filled with people, and she thought with derision of the extraordinarily few she had known, really known, in her life."
Wait, what? Did that really say? No way. No freakin' way.
*rereads*
"They owned plates. They all had socks."
This is no-shit honest-to-God ripped right from the pages of this book. Page 69 of the Algonquin Paperbacks edition.
Here is an example of the unsexy sexy thoughts of one Mr. Ralph Truitt, sex maniac who constantly thinks about sex. (This is from page 94 of the same edition.)
"He wanted her teeth to bite him. To leave marks on his back, his legs. He wanted her hair to strangle him. He wanted her to tell him that his touch would not kill her.
He wanted to slice her open and lie inside the warm blood of her body."
RUN, CATHERINE!
And then the rape scene at the end. I just...really? Really? This is the high dramatic moment you want to close out the conflict with? More excruciating detail from Plot Point Character Antonio's perspective full of sentences such as:
"He took his hand away from her mouth and kissed her, violated her mouth with his tongue and bit at her lips and still she didn't make a sound, still she stood twisting beneath his arms, but soundlessly, only the rustle of her skirt on the floor, only the sound of the flapping wings of birds and the rustling of the palm fronds where the birds alighted."
Two things about the above sentence: 1. This story takes place in Wisconsin, which apparently had palm trees in 1907. 2. My dad read a Rumpole of the Bailey book in which the first sentence took up a page and a half. Looks like Goolrick's giving old Rumpole a run for his money there.
Then there is this: "His hair was wild, it was slick with sweat from the exertion of doing this thing he didn't want to do, this thing he had to do to bring himself one step closer to his own death."
He had to do this thing he did not want to do but had to do this thing that was a bad thing to do. That's how I read that.
And then Catherine starts crying because apparently Goolrick heard that women cry when they're raped, so he had to put that in. You know, for realism.
And then Ralph Truitt walks in and finds Antonio raping his (Ralph's) wife. Antonio's response is "Yes! I raped her. I've been with her, inside her a thousand times. Do you know what she is? Do you know who she is?"
HIGH DRAMA! Or, as the Master Thespian put it, ACTING!
And we wrap up the scene by having Ralph and Antonio get out years of father/son rage (which is why I called him Plot Point Antonio earlier) by fighting and running out onto the thin ice where Antonio falls through and dies in the icy water which I'm sure is very tragic indeed.
This book was on the New York Times bestseller list. Just more proof that people will buy anything if you slap a pretty cover on it.